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Our bedroom

August 5, 2011

used to be a real peachy combination: mauve carpet and apricot walls and ceilings. It was like that when we moved into the house and I have meant to paint it for quite a while. I would wake up thinking of nectarines. Not really, but that was the color scheme.

It wasn’t just the color that I didn’t like. The people who owned the house before us had three boys. Everything was painted in gloss paint, presumably so they could wash walls with great frequency. The only problem was, the paint was such poor quality that wall washing not only removed dirt from the walls, it also removed the paint. Right down to the drywall. I am not very fond of gloss paint. I prefer flat. I have methodically been repainting everything in the house.

The house sort of has two parts. The old part and the new part. The new part has a huge great room with very tall ceilings. That room and the bathroom in the new part are now the only two areas I haven’t painted. The great room intimidates me because it will require scaffolding to paint. We may just sell the house instead — if someone would buy it.

I know it’s not the best economy for selling homes. But, we did sell the other house last year with most of our furniture and many of my other belongings such as linens, dishes, lamps and other household items. For a multitude of reasons, we haven’t actually replaced a lot of that yet. I guess it would be fair to say that furniture just isn’t a priority for us.

You’ll have to keep this in mind as you look at the before and after pictures of the bedroom. Before, we had a king-size mattress and box springs on a bed frame. Now, we have a queen-size mattress and box springs that sit on the floor. I did buy a cute little washstand with a marble top to serve as a nightstand. Anyway, I present to you before (with before being a little over a year ago with the furniture we used to have) and after (with after being just a few minutes ago).

Imagine the bed about 8 inches higher with a bed frame or, even better, with an actual bed, and I think it’s a pretty grand transformation.

The colors don’t really show up all that clearly in the picture. In fact, they change all day long and they cause me to look twice to try and figure them out. The two dark walls are a color called Swing Brown that looks remarkably like the color of melted milk chocolate. The two light walls are painted Unfussy Beige, which is in the paint tray, a very unfussy pale tan color. On the wall, it reflects the mauve carpet and looks a teeny little bit lavender. Not much, just a little. The ceiling is a lighter shade of the beige and is called Hush White. All together, the massive amounts of brown in the room have helped to tone down the mauve carpet and make it look much less mauve-like. Now, it’s almost mauvey-brown. A great improvement coming from the one-who-hates-pink-and-pink’s-relatives.

You may notice that in spite of me saying that we sold the other house with all our furniture, the same pieces appear in both pictures. I refused to part with my little antique dresser and they didn’t want the RNK’s huge 60s dresser or my cheap little lingerie chest. So, they came with and are comfortably placed back in the bedroom. Maybe someday, we’ll get the RNK a new dresser and I’ll paint the lingerie chest with some wonderful something or other and turn it into a cute little thing. Meanwhile, it is what it is.

And for one parting shot, we have a lot of hawks around here. I saw this guy on my way to town last week.